The question of who's really
an American Indian, what with the variation in blood quantum requirements from
tribe to tribe, is confusing enough, and it's mostly because the Federal government
has a long history of meddling, claiming the right to tell Indian people who
they are and who they ought to be.

Blood Quantum is the total
percentage of your blood that is tribal native due to bloodline. All of the
Nations use Blood Quantum as a requirement for membership. Usually this is detailed
on a CDIB (Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood) Card issued by the United
States Government. Additionally, many of the Nations have other requirements
for Membership.

As to how it affects you, that is a matter of some debate. Some Native Americans
will never recognize you as "Indian" unless you are an enrolled member of a
Federally Recognized Tribe, Band, or Nation. Others will recognize you as "Indian"
if you are making an honest effort to reconnect with your own ancestral culture.

Today over three hundred
American Indian tribes (excluding Alaskan villages) in the United States are
by treaty or executive order recognized by the federal government and receive
services from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. There are additionally some 125
to 150 groups seeking federal recognition, and dozens of others that might do
so in the future.

Let us look at these issues
from a traditional and political viewpoint. Non-federally recognized tribes
have been around for a long time. In fact, ALL tribes were non-federally recognized
until the Continental Congress began to negotiate treaties with some Native
nations in the 1770s. But the new U.S. federal government chose to concentrate
its attention upon nations found west of the Appalachians or in Florida, ignoring
virtually every tribe located within the core boundaries of the original thirteen
states. The eastern tribes were left to flounder in a sea of neglect, racism,
and ambiguity, in spite of the new federal Constitution that established federal
supremacy over "commerce" with the tribes. Historically this clearly documents
that the original Native American traditional culture is to be Non-federally
recognized. Ironic how political definitions get turned around to suit current
generations?

The issue of sovereignty
is at the heart of current disputes over the opening of casinos by Native communities.
It is generally conceded that federally recognized tribes possess a residue
of sovereignty (self-rulership/government), which enables them to use their
land base in self-determined ways not subject to state laws (except in certain
cases). However, it is not generally recognized that state-recognized tribes,
which possess reserved lands (formerly known as "Indian towns" and later as
reservations), also are likely to possess the same degree of sovereignty as
federally recognized tribes.

Another factor involves
our country's "love affair" with racism and stereotyping, a factor, which very
much affects most eastern tribes (though not all). Tragically, non-tribal people
have come to believe that Native Americans should physically resemble the Sioux
or Navajos seen on television, or the Italians playing Indians in old Western
movies. Our contemporary schoolbooks and films do not explain to the public
that eastern Native communities were often places of refuge in the colonies
and states, places where the laws of racial segregation did not apply.

From New England to Florida
most Native tribes provided homes for persons of mixed white and Native, Black
and Native, and other combinations of ancestry. As a result many eastern Indians
began to partially resemble African-Americans (and, indeed, large numbers of
African-Americans have American racial ancestry in any case, from the Caribbean
as well as from the United States itself). This presents a challenge, then,
for white people obsessed with stereotypes. They might be willing to accept
a white-Indian mixed person as an Indian, but their racial sensitivity balks
at recognizing a person of part-African appearance. Things have not changed
all that much in two centuries!

The 1990 U.S. Census reported
the largest number of Native Americans in the states of Oklahoma, California,
Arizona, and New Mexico. The census also indicated that slightly over half of
Native Americans live in urban areas; cities with the largest Native American
populations are New York, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Tulsa, Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St.
Paul, Anchorage, and Albuquerque. Around one-fourth of American Indians in the
United States live on 278 reservations (or pueblos or rancherias) or associated
"tribal trust lands," according to the census.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs
has used a "blood quantum" definition—generally, one-fourth degree of American
Indian "blood"—and/or tribal membership to recognize a person as an American
Indian. However, each tribe has a particular set of requirements, typically
including a blood quantum, for membership (enrollment) in the tribe. Requirements
vary widely from tribe to tribe: a few tribes require at least a one-half Indian
(or tribal) blood quantum; many others require a one-fourth blood quantum; still
others, generally in California and Oklahoma, require a one-eighth, one-sixteenth,
or one-thirty-second blood quantum; and some tribes have no minimum blood quantum
requirement at all but require an explicitly documented tribal lineage.

Recently, December 16,
2003, a Southwest Tribe made headlines when it announced that 50 Percent Isleta
Blood Needed To Stay In Tribe. Dozens of people who spent their whole lives
thinking they were members of the Isleta Pueblo are finding out they are not.
People on the Pueblo have been getting letters telling them they have to have
50 percent Isleta blood to be part of the tribe. The letters they received say
that people can challenge them if they fill out a family tree proving their
heritage.

Also in Southern California,2/03/
2004, Tribal power is exercised to fulfill political goals.

"Tribes — as sovereign nations — are shielded from lawsuits filed
against them. Velie, however, contends that individuals are not protected
by sovereign immunity when they act outside the authority granted to
them by the tribe.

The plaintiffs allege that the committee members violated Pechanga Band
law and imposed standards above those required by the Pechanga Constitution
by launching disenrollment proceedings against them. The lawsuit also
accuses the committee members of trying to increase their own portions
of casino profits by diminishing the number of tribal members eligible
for profit-sharing payments.

The plaintiffs trace their family line back to Manuel Miranda, granddaughter
of Pablo Apish, the Pechanga headman who received a 2,223-acre land
grant from California Gov. Pio Pico in 1845.

The committee members maintain that Miranda, who was half Pechanga according
to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, moved off the reservation and cut her
ties to the tribe 80 years ago. As a result, they are now demanding
additional documentation of linear descent from the disputed members,
most of whom have enjoyed full membership rights for 25 years."

History is
being rewritten across the Americas in this new millennium. Native Americans
(peoples marginalized by modernity) are perfectly capable of defending themselves;
you don't have to do it for them. Written history is a seriously overrated Enlightenment
construction. Most peoples have lived without for most times. Written history
is used to justify political and social power. Western civilization thought
seems to be arguing that mythic histories, epics, folk-knowledge and non-historicized
versions of the past open up possibilities for thinking. Utopian thinking is
the only response possible when you have destroyed all other possibilities for
thinking the past when history has become the only legitimate resource for accessing
the past. This situation has come to dominate Western societies experience of
the past. The west has destroyed its past outside history.

The post-industrial, Pan-Indian
Movement emerged in 1977 when the Haudenosaunee, and Indians from North and
South America, presented their Great Law of Peace to the United Nations, with
a warning that Western civilization, through the process of colonialism, was
destroying the earth's ability to renew her. They recommended the development
of liberation technologies, which would be anti-colonial, or self-sustaining,
and the development of liberation theologies. A liberation theology will develop
in people a consciousness that all life on the earth is sacred and that the
sacredness of life is the key to human freedom and survival (Akwesasne Notes
1978: basic call to consciousness). The Peacemaker argued not for the establishment
of law and order, but for the full establishment of peace, and universal justice.

In 1978, Indians walked
from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., this trek was called The Longest Walk.
The outcome of this walk was the Native American Freedom of Religion Act. During
this walk participants were taught spiritual wisdom. The spiritual leaders got
together and worked out ceremonies that did not conflict with any one Indian
Nation's spiritual beliefs. Many Indian Nations are forbidden, by prophecy,
to share their specific religious beliefs, even with other Indians, and with
members of their own tribe who are less than full bloods. A Lakota spiritual
leader had a vision that the colors black, red, yellow and white, our sacred
colors, stood for the four races. The Lakota offered their Sweat Lodge ceremony
and the Sweat Lodge has become the most widely spread ceremony in Pan- Indians.
It was in the Lakota Sweat Lodge that we first learned to pray for all my relations.

After the Longest Walk
the Lakota Sun Dance extended to California at D-Q University at Davis. Many
of the Indians who had been on the Longest Walk, participated in that Sun Dance.
Now, reportedly, there has been another vision of Buffalo Calf Woman turning
into buffalo of the four sacred colors. This has served to bolster the idea
that the Red Road is for everyone.

The Pan-Indian movement
is made up of all four races, but the largest contingency are non-federally
recognized Indians, primarily urban, who are desperately clinging to their Indian
identity. These people are not white, although some white people do also Sun
Dance, they are very much in the minority, and are usually related to or have
married into Indian families. Many Mixed Bloods (with less than 1/4 from a single
tribe), because the federal government no longer recognizes them as Indians,
even though they may have 100% Indian blood, do not come under the jurisdiction
of the BIA or Tribal councils, so their rights to the Bill of Rights have not
been abrogated. Nationhood implies conformity with international human rights
ethics. Ethnic cleansing is a violation of human rights.

Indians ceded their land
to the government by Treaty. A Treaty is an international contract. Contracts
are the crux of Western civilization. It is unconscionable in today's world
to deny a whole group of people the fulfillment of their contracts solely on
the basis of race.

To understand the current
USA mis-adventure in Iraq, look a little closer to home. Keetowah Cherokee Ward
Churchill book Struggle for the Land excerpts lay bare a devastating
account of land robbery and genocide against the Native American peoples in
North America, from the earliest days of the Republic. Racism, disdain, and
greed for Native American lands drove 13 small British colonies to break away
from England. In Struggle for the Land, the earlier of these two books,
Churchill clarifies that "independence" from England was little more than King
George's giving up his "option" to buy native lands which he had by virtue of
the "right of discovery." Likewise, the Louisiana Purchase was acquiring from
Napoleon the right to purchase land from Indians. As a rogue rebellion looking
for Nationhood, our earliest legal documents from the 1820s endeavored to legitimize
the United States by treating Indians as sovereign nations with whom we (USA)
would enter into treaties. "Legally speaking," quotes Churchill from one such
document, "so long as a tribe exists and remains in possession of its lands,
its title and possession are sovereign and exclusive."

But of course it was not
to be. Chief Justice John Marshall, who had received 10,000 acres in grants
west of the Appalachians in return for fighting in the Revolutionary War, declared,
invoking an obscure Norman law, that the land was "vacant" and therefore Euro-American
deeds were legitimate. By 1832, he was declaring that all natives were "subordinate"
to the U.S., a simple statement of colonialism, before the genocide of Western
tribes had even begun. Marshall went even further and declared that natives
"committed aggression" when they attempted to regain control of their land.

In 1823, the Christian
Doctrine of Discovery was quietly adopted into U.S. law by the Supreme Court
in the celebrated case, Johnson v. McIntosh (8 Wheat. 543). Writing for
a unanimous court, Chief Justice John Marshall observed that Christian European
nations had assumed "ultimate dominion" over the lands of America during the
Age of Discovery, and that - upon "discovery" - the Indians had lost "their
rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations," and only retained a
right of "occupancy" in their lands. In other words, Indians nations were subject
to the ultimate authority of the first nation of Christendom to claim possession
of a given region of Indian lands. [Johnson:574; Wheaton:270-1]

According to Marshall,
the United States - upon winning its independence in 1776 - became a successor
nation to the right of "discovery" and acquired the power of "dominion" from
Great Britain. [Johnson:587-9] Of course, when Marshall first defined the principle
of "discovery," he used language phrased in such a way that it drew attention
away from its religious bias, stating that "discovery gave title to the government,
by whose subject, or by whose authority, the discovery was made, against all
other European governments." [Johnson:573-4] However, when discussing legal
precedent to support the court's findings, Marshall specifically cited the English
charter issued to the explorer John Cabot, in order to document England's "complete
recognition" of the Doctrine of Discovery. [Johnson:576] Then, paraphrasing
the language of the charter, Marshall noted that Cabot was authorized to take
possession of lands, "notwithstanding the occupancy of the natives, who were
heathens, and, at the same time, admitting the prior title of any Christian
people who may have made a previous discovery." [Johnson:577]

In other words, the Court
affirmed that United States law was based on a fundamental rule of the "Law
of Nations" - that it was permissible to virtually ignore the most basic rights
of indigenous "heathens," and to claim that the "unoccupied lands" of America
rightfully belonged to discovering Christian European nations. Of course, it's
important to understand that, as Benjamin Munn Ziegler pointed out in The International
Law of John Marshall, the term "unoccupied lands" referred to "the lands in
America which, when discovered, were 'occupied by Indians' but 'unoccupied'
by Christians." [Ziegler:46]

Ironically, the same year
that the Johnson v. McIntosh decision was handed down, founding father
James Madison wrote: "Religion is not in the purview of human government. Religion
is essentially distinct from civil government, and exempt from its cognizance;
a connection between them is injurious to both."

This type of legal history
is the foundation for Churchill's devastating critique of U.S. government policies
toward indigenous peoples in the United States. Struggle for the Land
is a series of precise, factual case studies of, for example, the Iroquois efforts
to reclaim their land in upstate New York (the entire city of Syracuse is on
native land), and the Lakota refusal to accept any amount of money for the Black
Hills. One of the most important facts in the book, though, is that Hitler used
the United States treatment of Indians as a model for his genocide. Consequently
in 1946, as the United States was preparing to sit in judgment on the Nazis
at Nuremberg, the Indian Claims Commission Act was passed in order to provide
a new veneer of legal rights to Indians, ostensibly giving them the right to
sue for lost land if claims were based on "fraud, duress, unconscionable consideration,
mutual or unilateral mistake," which, of course, they were.

In another section, Churchill
describes the "radioactive colonization" of native land (i.e., the pursuit of
mining rights for uranium (60 percent lies on native reservations), and oil
and gas (20 percent on native reservations). Ninety percent of mining takes
place on native land. In one concise chart, Churchill outlines 33 different
corporations who have leases in areas in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota,
and Wyoming. There are more than 5,000 in the Black Hills alone. Locally, the
Hanford plutonium plant leaks toxins from storage tanks into the fishing grounds
of the Columbia River Yakima, leading to illness, sickened, malformed and dead
fish, and a host of other problems.

The funds from leases are
kept in "trust" by the government, and, of course, the tribes see little of
them. This Northern Plains Lady, Elouise Cobell, is bringing the issue to the
light of day in court. This is an excerpt from an article in 2004 Blackfeet
Reservation Development Fund, Inc.

"When I went to Washington on a hot, sultry June day in 1996 to file a lawsuit
over the billions of dollars of trust funds that the government had lost, misplaced
and otherwise grossly mismanaged for hundreds of thousands of American Indians,
I had no idea I would still be in court seven years later.

Yet today, after three Cabinet secretaries have been held in contempt by a federal
judge and after four lengthy trials and a successful defense on appeal of our
claims on the merits, the federal government has failed to clean up the trust
records. It cannot certify the accuracy of a single one of the estimated 500,000
current individual Indian trust accounts.

That's the sad bottom line on how the federal government has continued to treat
the nation's first citizens.

All I and three other Indians are asking the government to do is account for
the tens of millions of acres of land the government forced into trust and to
account for and distribute -- to the proper trust beneficiaries -- the correct
amount of funds it received and invested from the leases it arranged for timber
sales and for oil, gas, minerals and grazing rights on Indian trust lands in
the West.

I may not be a lawyer, but I was a small-town banker in Montana. I know that
the most basic of duties of any trustee is to account for all trust assets,
including the funds they hold for the beneficiaries.

Unfortunately, the commissioner of the Bureau of Public Debt, a senior Treasury
Department official, testified in our case that the United States has used our
trust funds to reduce the national debt.

But no one knows how much of our money was used to reduce the debt load of this
country or how many years the U.S. government used our trust money for these
and other important government purposes, such as building dams and major power
projects in the West.

We hope an accounting will finally tell the true story of how the government
has used Individual Indian Trust funds for more than 100 years. And, we also
hope that we will learn what really happened to 40 million acres of Individual
Indian Trust land that simply vanished, according to the testimony of the head
of Interior's Office of Historical Accounting.

Seven years later, Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the government's trustee-delegate
for the nation's first citizens, has done nothing to provide us answers to this
and other important trust accounting issues.

Why the delay? Why the deception? Why the disdain for the obligations Norton
owes to hundreds of thousands of Individual Indian Trust beneficiaries, many
of whom live in Washington state?

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and others have said it's because Indians lack political
clout in the nation's capital. Any other interest group would have had this
problem resolved immediately, McCain has said. There is no dispute about the
evidence. Study after study has warned Congress that our trust funds were being
horribly managed by the Department of Interior. Billions of dollars are missing.

In 1989, the Senate Special Committee on Investigations found that "fraud and
corruption pervade" the Interior Department. The General Accounting Office warned
both Republican and Democratic administrations for years that this is a very
serious problem.

In 1994, Congress ordered Interior to account for the missing funds. Nothing
happened.

So we Indians did what others similarly situated would have done. We turned
to the courts for help to straighten out an obdurate and dishonest executive
and an uninterested Congress.

Since we filed our suit, we have won several significant victories. In 1999,
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth declared the government breached its trust
responsibilities to us and ordered the interior secretary and the treasury secretary
to provide us a complete accounting of all trust assets, including the revenues
generated from our trust lands since the creation of the Individual Indian Trust
in 1887. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously
agreed with Lamberth and found that the interior secretary had engaged in "malfeasance"
and has unduly delayed the accounting, causing irreparable harm to all of us.

The government's record as trustee for Indians is "a long and sorry story,"
Lamberth declared. "... It is fiscal and governmental irresponsibility in its
purest form."

Tough words, to be sure -- but they are utterly meaningless unless Norton is
compelled to do what she is required to do by law.

Continuing to rely on the good faith of the interior secretary is an exercise
in futility. We can settle this case, but the government first must participate
in settlement talks with integrity, something they have refused to do for the
seven years this case has been litigated.

It must stop hiding behind disingenuous excuses, defending the indefensible
and protecting incompetent and dishonest officials.

Any settlement must be fair and just to make Indians whole for monies that have
been collected by the United States for 116 years.

It is, after all, our money. It is our property right." Elouise Cobell is making
history.

Churchill explains step
by step the attempted genocide of indigenous cultures. Just a few of the techniques
were preemptive and deceptive leases: the General Allotment Act, which replaced
collective ownership with individual ownership; the forced change in indigenous
government to the Tribal Council (modeled like a corporate board); the 1956
Relocation Act, intended to force indigenous peoples to move to slums in cities,
etc. In 1953, the United States attempted to unilaterally dissolve 109 indigenous
nations in its borders. By 1990, more than half of all Indians were no longer
on their land bases. But rather than completely obliterate native entities,
the U.S. government decided to keep them alive and restructure their government
into an entity which could be a signer to negotiations for mineral leases. "Native
nations were cast as always being sovereign enough to legitimate Euro American
mineral exploitation on their reservations," writes Churchill, "never sovereign
enough to prevent it."

For the purpose of enriching
the few, hypocrisy, lies, and lawbreaking have been the basis of United States'
policies toward indigenous peoples from its founding years. So of course we
are still doing it today. We are simply operating on a different continent.

Native Americans today
are distributed unevenly throughout North America, a reflection more of events
following European arrival than of aboriginal patterns. The 1990 U.S. Census
reported the largest number of Native Americans in the states of Oklahoma, California,
Arizona, and New Mexico. The census also indicated that slightly over half of
Native Americans live in urban areas; cities with the largest Native American
populations are New York, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Tulsa, Los Angeles, Minneapolis-St.
Paul, Anchorage, and Albuquerque. Around one-fourth of American Indians in the
United States live on 278 reservations (or pueblos or rancherias) or associated
"tribal trust lands," according to the census. The largest of these is the Navajo
Reservation, with 143,405 Native Americans and 5,046 non-Indians living there
in 1990. Around 60 percent of the Native American population of Alaska lives
in "Alaska Native Villages."

The twentieth-century population
increase for Native Americans reflected in successive U.S. Census figures was
also due to changes in the U.S. Census Bureau's definition of Native American.
Since 1960 the Census Bureau has relied on self-identification to ascertain
a person's race. Much of the increase in the American Indian population—from
523,591 in 1960 to 792,730 in 1970 to 1.37 million in 1980 to 1.9 million (including
Eskimos and Aleuts) in 1990—resulted from persons not identifying themselves
as American Indian in an earlier census but identifying themselves as such in
a later census. It has been estimated, for example, that as much as 60 percent
of the apparent population growth of American Indians from 1970 to 1980 may
be accounted for by such changing identifications! The political mobilization
of American Indians in the 1960s and 1970s, along with other ethnic-pride movements,
may have lifted some of the stigma attached to an American Indian racial identity.
This would be especially true for persons of mixed ancestry who formerly had
declined to disclose their American Indian background. Conversely, persons with
minimal American Indian background may have identified as American Indian out
of a desire to affirm a "romanticized" notion of being American Indian.

Today over three hundred
American Indian tribes (excluding Alaskan villages) in the United States are
legally recognized by the federal government and receive services from the Bureau
of Indian Affairs. There are additionally some 125 to 150 groups seeking federal
recognition, and dozens of others that might do so in the future. The Bureau
of Indian Affairs has used a "blood quantum" definition—generally, one-fourth
degree of American Indian "blood"—and/or tribal membership to recognize a person
as an American Indian. However, each tribe has a particular set of requirements,
typically including a blood quantum, for membership (enrollment) in the tribe.
Requirements vary widely from tribe to tribe: a few tribes require at least
a one-half Indian (or tribal) blood quantum; many others require a one-fourth
blood quantum; still others, generally in California and Oklahoma, require a
one-eighth, one-sixteenth, or one-thirty-second blood quantum; and some tribes
have no minimum blood quantum requirement at all but require an explicitly documented
tribal lineage.

Tribes located on reservations
have generally required higher degrees of blood quantum for membership than
those not located on reservations. This pattern of requiring low percentages
of Indian "blood" for tribal membership and relying on federal authorities to
certify membership may be seen as a reflection of demographic decline. As the
number of American Indians was reduced and American Indians came into increased
contact with whites, blacks, and others, American Indian peoples increasingly
married non-Indians. As a result, American Indians have had to rely on formal
certification from the federal government as proof of their "Indianness."

In the early 1980s the
total membership of the three hundred recognized U.S. tribes was about 900,000.
Therefore, many of the 1.37 million persons identifying themselves as American
Indian in the 1980 census were not actually enrolled members of federally recognized
tribes. In fact, only about two-thirds were. In the late 1980s the total tribal
membership was around 1 million; hence, only about 53 percent of the 1.9 million
people identifying themselves as American Indian in the 1990 census were actually
enrolled. Such discrepancies have varied considerably from tribe to tribe. Most
of the 158,633 Navajos enumerated in the 1980 census and the 219,198 enumerated
in the 1990 census were enrolled in the Navajo Nation; however, only about one-third
of the 232,000 Cherokees enumerated in the 1980 census and of the 308,132 enumerated
in the 1990 census were actually enrolled in one of the three Cherokee tribes
(the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians [of North
Carolina], and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians of Oklahoma). Thus
the Navajo Nation is the American Indian tribe with the largest number of enrolled
members, but more persons identifying themselves as Native American identified
themselves as Cherokee in the 1980 and 1990 censuses than did persons of any
other tribe. The two other largest groups in the 1990 census were the Chippewas,
or Ojibwas, (103,826) and the Sioux (103,255).

Similarities and differences
exist in Canada. Officially, to be an Indian in Canada, one must be registered
under the Indian Act of Canada; a person with Indian ancestry may or may not
be registered. Categories of Canadian Indians include "status" or registered
Indians, persons registered under the act; and "non-status" or non-registered
Indians, persons who either never registered or gave up their registration and
became enfranchised. Status Indians may be further divided into treaty or non-treaty
Indians, depending on whether their group ever entered into a treaty relationship
with the Canadian government. Of the 575,000 American Indians in Canada in the
mid-1980s, some 75,000 were non-registered and some 500,000 were registered.

In conclusion a recent
article on Native American colonization by John C. Mohawk in Indian Country
Today summarizes these issues best.

Most of the indigenous
peoples of the Americas (and all in Canada and the U.S.) faced a very serious
reality. In their country, the invaders outnumbered the indigenous, sometimes
by hundreds to one. They were not going to go back home. In addition, their
stated goal was the eradication of the indigenous nations as nations by eroding
all of the elements that make a distinct people a people: their history, their
languages, their laws and customs. It took quite a while and a lot of boarding
schools, missionaries, and corrupt public officials but the process - being
colonized - has had an impact. When an individual loses his or her memory, they
cannot recognize other people, they become seriously disoriented, and they don’t
know right from wrong. Sometimes they hurt themselves. Something similar happens
when a people become colonized. They can’t remember who they are because they
are a people without a common history. It’s not that they don’t have a history,
it’s just that they don’t know what it is and it’s not shared among them. Colonization
is a kind of spiritual collapse of the nation. This is one result of a colonial
education based on canonical "great books" texts. Indigenous peoples’ histories
and cultures are not in those texts, and the life of the nation is not there,
either. Identity is important. The colonists were very successful "radicalizing"
indigenous identities such that people talk about being 25 percent of this or
40 percent of that, but one does not belong to a nation based on one’s blood
quantum. Belonging to an indigenous nation is a way of being in the world. Holding
a membership card is not a way of being and money can’t buy it.

Colonization is the greatest health risk to indigenous peoples as individuals
and communities. It produces the anomie - the absence of values and sense of
group purpose and identity - that underlies the deadly automobile accidents
triggered by alcohol abuse. It creates the conditions of inappropriate diet,
which lead to an epidemic of degenerative diseases, and the moral anarchy that
leads to child abuse and spousal abuse. Becoming colonized was the worst thing
that could happen five centuries ago, and being colonized is the worst thing
that can happen now.

De-colonization, on the other hand, means many different things to many different
peoples. In principle, however, it means undoing the damage of colonization
and involves elements such as living traditions and customs, language retention,
and an insistence on the right to BE Lakota or Ganienkehaka or O’otam or Tipai
or whatever nation it is that people have a right to be.